Google apologizes for approving Nazi Concentration Camps in the Game Ingress

Google apologizes for approving Nazi Concentration Camps in the game Ingress. Google Owned startup, Niantic Labs developed Ingress game, which is a multiplayer augmented reality RPG unleashed for Android smartphones and Tabs.

Players in the game Ingress are allowed to submit monuments and historic landmarks for the game, but only after the approval by Google. This week, Google approved for the Nazi concentration camps of Dachau and Sachsenhausen and Auschwitz.

Statements made on approval of Nazi Concentration Camps by Google:

Gunter Morsch, the head of the Sachsenhausen Memorial, said “All of us here are completely appalled. This is most definitely no place for video games.”

Director of the memorial site at Dachau, Gabriele Hammermann told the dpa news agency that Google’s actions were humiliating for relatives and victims of the Nazi camps.

“Google engaged in a dangerous trend of Holocaust trivialization. The more our society engages in Holocaust trivialization, the more it is likely for us to see this phenomenon: that even concentration camps become the subject of games. It’s sad, it is very sad,” said Abraham H. Foxman, Anti-Defamation League’s Director and a Holocaust survivor from Poland.

John Hanke, Head of Niantic Labs said in a statement “After we were made aware that a number of historical markers on the grounds of former concentration camps in Germany had been added, we determined that they did not meet the spirit of our guidelines and began the process of removing them in Germany and elsewhere in Europe. We apologize that this happened.”

Google apologizes for approving Nazi Concentration Camps in the game Ingress. They said that they approved the locations as they were of significant historical value. Prizes given to the players in the game have been condemned as sick and an insult to the memory of the millions of victims.

And still no one asks the users about the issue. Many use these portals as a mechanism for discovery. They seek out these portals and learn something from a historical marker they never knew existed or find out something new in a place that they frequent. It trivializes the meaning of these monuments to shut them up and lock them away.